UCLA In the News April 27, 2018

Jeff Brantingham is as close as it gets to putting a face on the controversial practice of “predictive policing.” Over the past decade, the University of California-Los Angeles anthropology professor adapted his Pentagon-funded research in forecasting battlefield casualties in Iraq to predicting crime for American police departments, patenting his research and founding a for-profit company named PredPol, LLC.… Now, Brantingham is using military research funding for another tech and policing collaboration with potentially damaging repercussions: using machine learning, the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal data, and an outdated gang territory map to automate the classification of “gang-related” crimes.

Jonathan Flint, who studies the genetics of depression at the University of California in Los Angeles, said: “Our current treatments for depression are relatively ineffective — roughly speaking, only about half of patients improve — so we really need better therapies. To discover new treatments and to deliver the ones we have more effectively, we need a better understanding of what causes depression. Finding genetic risk variants is a way to do just that — the risk variants point to genes that are involved in the disease, and thus provide clues to how depression arises.”

It’s not hard to imagine how difficult it would be to complete the simplest of daily tasks if your hands and fingers were paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury. Six people so afflicted have now regained the use of their hands and fingers after participating in a UCLA-led study of a non-surgical, non-invasive spinal stimulation technique.

“These marriages are not leading, to the best of our knowledge, to long-term marriages where they’re living together,” [UCLA’s] Jody Heymann told Teen Vogue. “So, I think that’s really important for people who believe that child marriage when there’s a pregnancy is actually forming a family and a long-term marriage. It’s not. It’s really not the solution.” Heymann serves as the dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. In this role, she assisted Alissa Koski, a postdoctoral scholar, in investigating the prevalence of child marriage in the U.S. Together, they published “Child Marriage in the United States: How Common Is the Practice, And Which Children Are at Greatest Risk?” a new study that goes further than any other to show just how prevalent child marriage is in the U.S.

“Laura’s passing is a profound loss,” said Chon Noriega, director of the [UCLA] Chicano Studies Research Center. “She had an ability to cut through the biases and habits of thought that makes us see a smaller world than actually exists. And she did it as an expression of the stunning beauty of the human body, including her own.” (Also: Associated Press)

Adds a blunt-spoken Tom Nunan, a former UPN network president who now teaches at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television: “Bill Cosby was once known as America’s dad. Now, he’ll forever be known as America’s rapist. And that’s the fact. There may be an appeal, but his reputation is forever scarred.”

A February report from UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies notes, “The industry has been much slower to accept the related truth that its success in providing today’s (and tomorrow’s) audiences with what they crave also hinges on the presence of diverse talent behind the camera.” This is where MoviePass, with its single fee for a monthly buffet of films, could be the most significant catalyst for cultural change since the internet and yoga pants. (Written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)

“If a male has a BRCA mutation, their risk of breast cancer increases 100-fold,” said senior study author Dr. Christopher Childers. He is a resident physician in the department of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. “But it’s not just breast cancer — BRCA mutations put men at higher risk for often aggressive prostate cancers that occur at younger ages,” Childers added in a university news release.

“There’s a pent-up demand for superhero films that’s been building since 1938 and 1939, when Superman and Batman came along, and it’s kind of exploded here in the 21st century,” said Jonathan Kuntz, a lecturer at the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California Los Angeles, in an interview on April 19.